THE GOOD LIFE

Artist Zheng Bo values equality and collaboration … not only with other humans, but also, and particularly, beyond. Perhaps best known for his video artworks depicting humans erotically interacting with plant life, including ferns in Taiwan (as in Pteridophilia, 2016 —ongoing) or trees in Sweden (as in Le Sacre du Printemps, 2022—ongoing), his work also encompasses gardening, drawing, workshops and performance. The artist’s philosophies and affinities aim for more harmony between all species on earth and an end to humanity’s dominance over other beings. Zheng’s practice follows the ­tenets of Daoism, and he, like those guidelines, considers life to be a long walk on an unknown path.

Raised in Beijing, educated in China and the United States and currently living in a remote village on Lantau Island–the least populated place in Hong Kong—Zheng cultivates a deepening relationship with nature as part of his practice. Whenever he can, he climbs a hill every day near his home to draw just one plant … spending time with it, sensing it. The theoretical underpinnings of his work, however, connect to science, politics, philosophy, art history, speculative action, and how bodies (and not just human ones) live in the world. nomad’s Kimberly Bradley spoke with Zheng on the occasion of his newly published mono­graph, ‘Wanwu I’ , on life, meaning and possibility in the sixth extinction.

ZHENG

BO

Your first book, titled Wanwu I, has just been published. You held an intriguing symposium in Berlin exhibition venue Gropius Bau called Wanwu Council, which looked at how to include non-human players in art institutions, and accompanied your exhibition there of the same name. You even lead a Wanwu practice group. What does the word mean?

 

Z
B

The word Wanwu appeared in Laozi’s Dao De Jing, a book compiled in the fifth century BCE. In Chinese, the word Wanwu literally means ten thousand things. I learned through the comparative philosopher Roger Ames that a good translation would be myriad happenings. Myriad, from the Greek, also means ten thousand. It’s interesting that both the Greek roots of myriad and the original Chinese term Wanwu mean ten thousand.

 

I like to use this word in my practice because it clearly puts us humans as just one of the ten thousand things—or myriad happenings—between heaven and earth. So the emphasis is much more than human. To me, the word has become a way to denote a more-than-human cosmology, a more-than-human mindset. But even if there are ten thousand things, I’m only working with a very small number of them. So the book is called Wanwu I, to say that this is only one of the many possibilities.

 

My newest film—Samur (2023), commissioned by the Jameel Arts Center in Dubai, where it’s part of my two-year artist’s garden—features two humans dancing with an umbrella thorn acacia tree (Vachellia tortilis; Samur in Arabic) in an expansive landscape in the Mleiha desert in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. We’re only interacting and learning about the tree in a preliminary encounter, but the idea is similar. As artists and humans, we are at a moment in which it is completely ridiculous for us to continue to believe that we are the only beings that matter. Currently we are the masters of the universe and we can do whatever we want. But this mindset is completely outdated.

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How can humanity be less arrogant and relinquish dominance? Is your work about showing the way?

 

Z
B

My practice does serve as an example. But when I’m working on this project, or when I'm going up the hill near my home on Lantau Island in Hong Kong to draw every day, I’m not thinking of how to show work to other humans, but rather of how I can cultivate myself towards this better way of living, because I don’t think I’ve got there yet. I didn’t grow up in a tradition of Indigenous wisdom, so I’m learning to be humbler and more sensitive to the larger ecological situation. I don’t know how many years I still have to live, and I’m almost certain that I won’t get there in this lifetime, because we humans have been disconnected for so long. We learn to forget from a very young age. So in these projects, I’m mainly cultivating myself—and perhaps bringing a few people along.

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What’s the most profound thing plants have taught you?

 

Z
B

I admire their ability to live. And I could even say they live happily. The umbrella thorn acacia lives in the desert, and it rains prob­ably less than ten days per year and the conditions for us are just so tough. But the tree thrives, with beautiful leaves and thorns. It enjoys the desert. It has been there for at least forty or fifty years. It looks just so beautiful. When a being is beautiful, there’s happiness in it. But of course almost everything on the planet is beautiful. Except many things that we humans build.

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Can working with plants change humanity?

 

Z
B

Yes, but I’m not really working with plants. I’m not planting, cultivating or caring for them. I’m mainly just spending time with them. Spending time with plants is probably one of the easiest things to do. But socially it’s one of the most difficult things to do in our contemporary society, because there are so many distractions. People often say my drawing is like meditation, but it shouldn’t be so difficult. Just talking a walk sounds as if it’s a luxury. It shouldn’t be this way, right? Taking a walk should be much easier than picking up your phone.

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It’s built to addict us to everything.

 

Z
B

I know. It’s considered the norm, but walking for an hour is considered exceptional.

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Could you talk about your relationship to Daoist wisdom? It comes up quite often in your book. And there are many elements in your practice that connect to this philosophy.

 

Z
B

A few things converge, because the way plants live is quite consistent with Daoism. It’s a set of ideas that provides a vocabulary for me to articulate what I feel when I work with plants, when I walk on the hill on Lantau Island. But it’s not like I’m reading the book and then it prescribes certain things for me to do; rather, Daoism provides a language. Reading a text is not the most important thing. If we walk in nature with plants, listen to birds and swim in the ocean every day for an hour, we develop that sensibility. Writings only give us words to describe the feeling that we can cultivate through these activities and ways of observing.

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Is moving through and sensing the environment a type of mindfulness and care? Is this something that we’ve lost with our speed and technology?

 

Z
B

I wouldn’t put emphasis on care. I would put emphasis on the notion of non-human. To me, what’s most important is to spend less time with other humans, within human constructs. The more we can spend time with plants, animals, water, rocks, the more we understand we are so small, and there are so many other things that we just didn’t pay attention to before.

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How did you shift as an artist from working with people to working with plants, in 2013?

 

Z
B

I was curious about different communities and society, like immigrant workers in Hong Kong, or queer communities in Beijing. In 2013 I was invited to do a project in a part of Shanghai that occupied a gap between industrial and post-industrial use. That part of the city had a lot of weeds. I just hadn’t noticed them before, and they completely surprised me. And I realised that I’d learned a lot about different communities in our society, but I’d never paid much attention to these plants in the city. I was shocked, so I decided to pay attention to them, to learn about them, to understand why they lived there. In a way, it was quite similar to my curiosity about different communities. Except that I’ve been learning about humans for forty years, and I’ve only been learning about plants for ten.

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Do you have relationships to individual plants?

 

Z
B

The tree in the desert comes to mind.